Food, drink, and alcohol companies are using similar strategies to the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies and should be regulated, say public health experts.

Negotiating with multinational companies on salt, fat and sugar levels or including calorie and alcohol amounts on labels in the way the UK government has done through its "responsibility deal" will not work, say the authors of a study published by the Lancet.

"Self-regulation is like having burglars install your locks," said Professor Ron Moodie of the University of Melbourne, Australia. "You feel you're safe, but you're not."

The paper is one of a series published by the medical journal on the large and growing threat of what are known as non-communicable diseases (NCDs) across the globe - namely cancer, heart disease and stroke, diabetes and respiratory diseases. All are caused partly by our lifestyles - smoking, eating processed food, drinking and taking less exercise - in response to a world where energy-dense food, sugary drinks and alcohol is cheap and heavily marketed.

In 2010, 34.5 million people around the world died from these diseases, which were 65% of all deaths that year. That is expected to rise to 50 million deaths a year by 2030 as the NCD epidemic spreads. The World Health Organisation has set a target to reduce these deaths by 25% by 2025.

Moodie and colleagues say that the food and drink industries should be treated like the tobacco industry - as companies with too much of a vested interest in the sale of unhealthy products to help curb the epidemic of disease. They must have no role in the formulation of national or international policy, they say.

"Regulation, or the threat of regulation, is the only way to change these transnational corporations. The industry must be put under pressure if it is to change."

The researchers were unable to find any health benefit to industry involvement in voluntary regulation or public-private partnerships. Industry documents, they say, reveal how companies shape public-health legislation and avoid regulation. They build "financial and institutional relations" with health professionals, non-governmental organisations, and national and international health agencies, says the paper. They distort research findings and they lobby politicians to oppose health care reform.

Huge multinational companies dominate sales worldwide. "The frequently used term 'competitive market' suggests a wide variety of traders; however, the most powerful corporate sectors of the world's food system are increasingly concentrated to the point of oligopoly.

"For example, in the USA, the 10 largest food companies control more than half of all food sales. Worldwide, this proportion is about 15% and is rising rapidly. More than half of global soft drinks are produced by large transnational companies."

The multinationals are now moving in on the developing world, the researchers say. "Saturation of markets in high-income countries has caused the industries to rapidly penetrate emerging global markets, as the tobacco industry has done. Almost all growth in the foreseeable future in profits and sales of these unhealthy commodities will be in low-income and middle-income countries [where consumption is currently low]."

The Food and Drink federation said: "We agree that action is required to tackle the worldwide health burden of obesity and diet-related diseases. However we believe that collaboration between a very wide range of organisations can successfully address the multifactorial causes of non-communicable diseases."